Hi.
I experience the same problem with my Asus F3F AP110 laptop. cdrecord complains there's no DMA and writing DVDs is slow. (cdrecord said that average speed was 1.4 the last time I looked). Any fresh ideas?

PS: this is what I get after unchecking the "< > generic/default IDE chipset support" opton (in ATA/ATAPI/MFM/RLL support) in my kernel configuration
Maybe I should check it but this is apparently not helping...

If you are using Gnome or KDE it should detect the drive automatically (if dbus and hal are installed and started) otherwise you should be able to access your drive through /dev/sr0_________________Favorite Quote: "The most profound technologies are those that disappear"

if your timed buffered disk reads is 'low', or nowhere near as high as 37.29 MB/sec , then the following solution will work for you:

1) go into /usr/src/linux and edit /usr/src/linux/include/pci_ids.h . Look for the string "PCI_DEVICE_ID_INTEL_ICH6_2". The value right beside it should read 0x2642. Now on a line __directly__under__
insert:

That should do it. Now just re-compile your kernel and perform the same hdparm test above, and you should have something along the lines of 25-38 MB/sec with DMA.

I really wish the gentoo-sources people would push this patch upstream, because I've been patching all of the kernels i've had since 2.6.16 with this (to have dma, sound, etc enabled.). Otherwise, disk reads happen ad something like 2MB per second, and it's completely dreadful. Today I just checked out gentoo-sources-2.6.19-r5 and was shocked that this patch hasn't been applied yet by anybody! wow!

The best thing to do is post the kernel panic (or at least write down the last few relevent lines) so that we can help debug everything.

Also, it's a very wise idea to always back up the bzImage from your previous kernel. If you're using grub, then as soon as grub comes up with a menu, you can hit up/down to prevent it from automatically loading, and then 'e' to edit the 'exec' command.

Just specify your backup kernel's name instead of the new one.

I'm interested to see where the bug falls during the linux boot process.

You should disable everything under ATA/ATAPI/MFM/RLL in your kernel config. Your optical device will be /dev/sr0 or so. You have to enable the SATA and SCSI stuff. (SATA device support -AHCI SATA support -Intel PIIX/ICH SATA support - Intel PATA MPIIX support )

Test it, but do not believe in hdparm in this point. Forget about UDMA on SATA. Try to copy a big file from dvd to hd. This shows a good improvement in my case. High transfer rate, low i/o waits, no freeze when accessing the dvd.